A couple of weeks ago, one of the VPs in my company suddenly passed away. A day of vomiting and diarrhea, followed by hospitalization, and shortly after that, gone.
He was 43 years old. Incredibly active, healthy and fit guy. He died of a very rare staph infection. By the time he was diagnosed, it was too late.
I think the lesson is that life is really short, and you never know when it will end. So you better make the most out of the time allotted to you, and the fact that you don't know how long you have left should only fuel your efforts.
It's awful when anyone dies, but I have to confess this seems so much worse to me since he was on the verge of seeing the fruits of his labor result in a historic success.
It was getting hyped up by the tech press and he was doing what he presumably loved right up to the end. I think this was probably a pretty happy point in his life. For me, actually finishing a project like this means a brief rush of satisfaction and then a funk of ennui. I think I'd rather die while I'm still working on something than when it's finished, and certainly it would have been worse to go while the company was still scrounging capital.
Because it's more fun for them if they chase. Really, very rarely should it make sense for cops to endanger countless civilian lives to catch a criminal.
If you're a patrolman then a car chase is probably one of the more exciting things you'll do, and it's a scenario that comes to mind when you first think of "this is what police do". In reality, you probably spend a lot of time checking mundane things, pulling people over (perhaps to meet a quota), and lots of paperwork and bureaucracy.
Even if it is scary, I think it's possible that some officers won't back down from a chase. And this involved a chase of someone believed to be a public menace.
(Sorry, not justifying the actual chase. Just pointing out that it's not strange that it occurred, given the status quo there)
Most cities do not allow cops to conduct high speed chases in populated areas. But it happens and innocent people die, because the cops are on a righteous mission and shall not be deterred.
I watched a 25 year old woman die on the pavement at 16th and Dolores in San Francisco, hit by a car running a red light, being chased by cops. Apparently the car had been reported stolen.
Not a worthy mission, in my opinion.
Note: of course it's the chasee's fault. But cops know exactly what happens in these situations, and cannot be excused.
It very rarely does make sense for police to endanger bystanders with high-speed chases, which is why most departments heavily restrict them. Friends of mine whose parents are officers have always told me their parents were more or less forbidden from ever initiating pursuit.
You can search for "[name of city] police general order pursuit", or some variant thereof, to get the policy for your local district.
Depending on the offense, there are reasons to do it. If there are not officers immediately behind the perps wherever they stop, they can quite easily disperse into the city or go into a building and take innocents hostage. I don't think the other hypotheses offered in this thread(15 minutes of fame, it's LA's reality show, etc) have quite so much to do with it, especially when you consider how vast LA is.
I think that having them disperse is the whole point of not chasing them. As far as taking hostages, I just don't think what you suggest makes any sense. The ONLY way I would consider taking hostages for any reason and making a stand against the police force would be if I had no other choice.. ie. the police won't stop chasing me.
I haven't read it since it came out in 2006, but suffice it to say that the Los Angeles area has vastly more police chases per capita than the rest of the United States, and therefore if something like this was going to happen it's statistically unsurprising that it happened near LA.
From that article: "In 2004, California led the nation with 7,321 pursuits, and the majority of them-5,596-took place in L.A. County". Google cites approximately 10 million population for LA County and 38 million for California, so if my math is right that's roughly 56 car chases per 100,000 population in LA County versus 6 per 100,000 in the rest of the state. (Population figures are 2011 for LA County, 2012 for California, versus 2004 for the chase stats, but it should be pretty close.)
That doesn't answer why the police chase, because obviously it's done far less elsewhere, though it does happen. In Austin, Texas, my wife was overtaken on the highway by a car being chased by the police, and in order to avoid getting rear-ended by the chasee who was going very fast she side-swiped the vehicle next to her and substantial damage was done. Some day if that criminal strikes it rich she's theoretically got victim's compensation due to her. We're not holding our breath. They ended up catching the guy on foot after he exited the highway.
> That doesn't answer why the police chase, because obviously it's done far less elsewhere, though it does happen.
I'd suggest trying to correlate average vehicular speed with frequency of car chases. My guess is that certain cities are built for high-speed car transit and thus lend themselves towards this kind of thing.
> That doesn't answer why the police chase, because obviously it's done far less elsewhere, though it does happen.
From the article:
> The L.A. freeways are its public stage, its Colosseum. Pursuits are L.A.'s ultimate reality show,
I'm not some scholar on Los Angeles, but it really seems to be part of the culture there to watch car chases, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is positive feedback encouraging criminals to get their 15 minutes of fame.
After all, if you've just held up a 7-11 or something and you didn't get away cleanly, why not have a little fun before you get thrown in jail, possibly for the rest of your life ?
While that may play some role, I'd argue that LA being a massive sprawl has more to do with it. Simply identifying the car and "silently following it until it stops" may not be so easy, at least not without a helicopter.
yeah, why the police bothers trying arresting criminal...
can't they stay in their office eating donuts ?
...
They risk their lives to keep yours safe.
And on the other side you have criminals. And you ask why police chase them and not why they ran away ???
Seriously ?
There has got to be a better way. Here in AZ they have limited this due to accidents and death of innocent bystanders. Maybe there is a way to pin the car and catch them more silently, with all the tech we have maybe the cops can get some sort of GPS/trackable weapon. Of course they have to be close enough or have it already installed. Either that or a better notification system where vehicles may be so people in that area are on the lookout and the road clears almost like the O.J. chase.
Don't be too sure - some of histories supposedly greatest people have also been mass killers. Your views on them largely just depend on which side of the conflict(s) you were on and what time you are in. To take a fairly simple example, Churchill. Lots of good, lots to admire. But plenty of dark decisions and many deaths attributable to these.
Because life is random and stochastic. The sooner you realize that your very existence was simply a roll of the dice, the more liberated you will become.
Just because he wrote some code that was used so widely doesn't make him more significant than a janitor who cleans after you, or the "gang" member who was evading the brutal cops for a chance for his freedom. The sooner we realize people are equal because they're human fucking beings the greater hope for humanity to avoid its imminent demise.
It's like asking what makes 5 greater than 5. Humans are all significant simply because they have rational minds and are rational beings. A human being cannot impose on others a value or worthiness, because we are rational beings and have independent minds. As you probably have noticed by now this is not me saying these things, it's from Immanuel Kant. I found these lectures on the topic absolutely amazing to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY
It's worth mentioning that all humans are -humans- just like 5 == 5.
However, the fact humans are humans doesn't make them equal. Unlike a number humans have dimensionality. They can be taller, shorter, stronger, weaker, smarter, dumber, richer, poorer etc. Along with any number of other attributes like job, geographical location, father, mother etc.
Equality is a very precise thing and humans are anything but equal.
You need to read some more philosophy (or, I guess, watch some more.) By asserting unconditional equality, you deny the existence of the will. That position can be defended, but I'm skeptical that you're up to the task at the moment.
Have you ever tried to talk to management about getting one of these plans together? They get mad at you for bringing it up and hexing the whole project!
My experience is you instead treat it like a computer backup problem and you add the contingency that top managers will know how to step in if information goes missing.
This so called "bus factor" has always bugged me. Documentation is good, but talk of untimely death by bus is silly.
The reference to untimely death by bus strike is an example of macabre geek humour; not a serious suggestion that the greatest threat to developers is posed by motorized mass transportation.
Most often developers leave projects -- and especially open source projects -- for far more banal reasons: They move to a different position and don't have the time or inclination to continue maintaining their old code.
Can someone else get access to all the company-owned code the developer was working on? Is someone insisting that the developer doesn't keep three months of work on a laptop? Who else can get access to the passwords and keys for company-owned servers and services maintained by the developer?
Not really. "Key developer gets a new job" means they are still available for you to ask questions to, get help locating passwords/keys from, and so forth. In the "key developer gets hit by bus" scenario, you don't have that luxury.
The idea isn't so much about being hit by a bus as "what would we do if a key contributor were to vanish off the face of the Earth with no notice or warning?" If the specific idea of the Death Bus seems too grim, feel free to replace it with another deus ex machina that would have the same effect (alien abduction, Christian rapture, surprise release of a new season of Firefly, etc.).
I just wanted to say two things here. One, this is an incredibly damaging tragedy. I truly wish the best for the community, for the Reisse and Oculus VR family.
Secondly, my father has been an officer of the law for more than 25 years -- can we please not turn a thread which is being used to inform the community at large of a tragedy as a way to defame those who wish to do good in their community.
I ask out of respect of Reisse, and my good natured father that we keep at the very least this thread on topic.
So because your father is a cop, you don't even want people to question the actions of the cops in the story? And anyway, so what? It sounds like the gang members were the ones out of control, not the police. If the police had struck Reisse that would be different, but they didn't. But then what if the police had done something reprehensible? Nothing should be said because we need to respect your good natured father? It's not about you or your father.
I'm pretty sure Xanza simply means that Reisse's death is a tragedy, and a conversation about the death of an important member in the developer community is hugely different from an argument about the role of police in our society.
Especially since internet discussions about police often turn into emotionally charged and hateful arguments, I think keeping the discussion focused on Reisse is a very good and respectful request.
Honestly they might as well change the name of HN to Digital Pravda or something. There is practically no story that can hit the HN frontpage now that doesn't turn into bikeshedding about how the U.S. is literally worse than Hitler and how everything is literally perfect in the EU.
I'm not saying that the U.S. is perfect, or that the EU isn't, but does anyone else remember when HN was for NEWS and not just an outgrowth of /r/politics?
I mean, obviously my comment won't change any of that, it's easy enough to see that the interest is there just by comparing comment count. But I do think it's unfortunate how much we have let politics poison the well here.
This is a story about the literal intersection of police, guns, gangs, speeding, pedestrian crosswalks, motor vehicle accidents, and the sudden, traumatic, and innocent bystander death of the co-founder of a visible startup. And you guys expect no discussion of politics?
Can you point to a single story since the inception of Hacker News that quite obviously involved the intersection of hacker/startup culture with the rest of society where politics were not discussed? What is any discussion about wealth or economics if not politics? Is it a vanishingly small percentage of PG's essays that express a strong political opinion?
As far as I'm concerned, discussing politics as they relate to hacker culture is on topic. Discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, not so on-topic, but nevertheless people here had interesting things to say from a hacker perspective. I'll be the first to agree that political extremism is aggravating, but the solution to political extremism is not the avoidance of politics altogether.
> I'll be the first to agree that political extremism is aggravating, but the solution to political extremism is not the avoidance of politics altogether.
On the contrary, avoidance of all politics is a wonderful individual solution to political extremism. Which is why so many "normal" people refuse to get involved at all, which is why all of us "normal" people end up so surprised every 2 years over a bunch of reactionary representatives being elected.
At least on HN you were able to have reasoned political discourse, which is far less aggravating. Even where I disagree with others I love being exposed to angles I hadn't considered, cultural nuances that might explain why something would work in the EU that wouldn't work in the U.S. (and vice versa), and all of that.
But from what I can tell even on HN we're shifting farther and farther away from that into the creationist mold of "I have decided what the answer must be, now I need only twist the facts to suit". Even where the answer that's decided on is actually right, that's no way to conduct a 'debate'.
So basically I feel the same way, having had several HN accounts over the years, and feeling totally disenfranchised as a voter, except that I think if more normal people said more normal, boring, nuanced, middle of the road type things about politics then the people having fights with each other wouldn't be so annoying, because they are a tiny fraction of the population. I understand this is a bit of a pipe dream, and it's frustrating when that tiny fraction dominates the conversation. It's just difficult to want to participate at all when people prioritize winning an argument over understanding the issues at hand.
I'm quite interested, and in my own way, involved in politics. I also follow bicycle racing with a passion, for that matter. But I don't think either one belongs on this particular web site.
This site has been a great resource for me in terms of startup material, also a good place to learn new things about 'computer stuff', and also occasionally read something genuinely new and interesting. I hate to see it dragged down into the mud of political debate, which tends to wreck communities such as this.
Ok, agreed more or less, and the mud slinging is terrible, but by political debate, what exactly do you mean?
I don't think you mean simply election politics, so my assumption is that you mean any kind of debate over government policy. In this example it would be a debate over the US government policy of pursuing suspects in high speed car chases.
I can understand how these kinds of things are off topic in the general case (Istanbul protests, Boston marathon, etc.), but are you saying they're still off topic when there's a fairly clear connection to a hacking / startup story? Are the discussions about rent control in SF off topic, for instance?
My belief is that there's a grey zone where considered discussion of the pros and cons is okay, even good. For instance, I wasn't even aware that there were debates about high speed chases at all, so for me this was something new and interesting. Most of the community wrecking I've seen has happened due to in-fighting and drama, but yes political mud fights are a common enough precursor to that, because they encourage people to hold grudges and take sides, at least in my experience.
> My belief is that there's a grey zone where considered discussion of the pros and cons is okay, even good.
Considered discussion is welcome on HN. Unfortunately there are some topics where considered discussion is unlikely. Abortion; circumcision; Israel / Palestine; gun control; etc etc. It'd be fantastic if there was a site like HN where these topics could be discussed, especially if that site fostered calm rational discussion.
But these discussions too often deteriorate into noise, and worse into wider ranging down-voting and derailments in other threads.
Well there's lesswrong I suppose, although I'm not a member. I strongly believe that if PG changed the policy from upvote agreement, downvote disagreement to upvote civility, downvote incivility, the quality of discussions would improve. For example, I was not particularly civil in the comment that started this sub-thread, but nevertheless I got 42 upvotes.
No, I simply think it's wrong to, in general, generalize. I've read this thread, and see a lot of police bashing, it's wrong. My father is a good man and has done his duty to the State of Pennsylvania honorably and I don't take kindly to anyone who is not in the law enforcement field and criticizes the actions of those who are. Even more so when they're not at all involved in the situation, or the thread in question (discussion?) is intended to inform, not to inspire hate for law enforcement.
To put it bluntly Reisse was hit by an automobile by a criminal. Should the police have pursued the suspect through a crowded city the way that they did? No, however no one here was at the scene; maybe they HONESTLY believed they could end the ordeal without a lengthy chase and without the suspect getting away. That's a judgement call that every law enforcement officer deals with from time to time; with human nature telling us that we can't be correct all the time.
>>defame those who wish to do good in their community.
This is an incredible cop-out. No pun intended.
Just because someone wishes to do good in their community does not mean they are immune to being criticized for their actions.
Furthermore, a lot of cops don't give a shit about doing good in their community. They are bullies who have joined the police force to legitimize their violent tendencies.
We need more "good cops" like your father, but let's face it: we will not get them if we do not draw people's attention to the bad stuff a lot of cops do.
I'm totally fine with not denigrating the cops that actually care about doing good in their communities. I'm just not convinced that all of them share that sentiment.
No - I was remarking that my father was a good man and police officer, and I didn't appreciate the police bashing going on in a thread on HackerNews that served to inform the public at large of a devastating blow to the tech community.
I ask out of respect of Reisse, and my good natured father that we keep at the very least this thread on topic.
Except there's no point in this story if it's not turned into some general political discussion about random aspect of society.
The template of these types of headlines is "Random incident happened to semi-famous tech dude". Therefore it's going to turn into some kind of "Let's discuss policy surrounding random incident".
Tragedies are and should be a time to re-examine our policies, and try to prevent them happening again. Whether there should be a policy against police engaging in these kind of pursuits (and with the understanding that police do so with best of intentions) is absolutely on topic.
I was about to lament how reckless the police were to be in a high-speed pursuit, but it's hard to fault them when this began with a fatal shooting of an officer at the beginning of the encounter.
Doesn't seem to me like the police were the ones who hit Reisse:
> Investigators allege 21-year-old Victor Sanchez and two
> other suspects then took off in a Dodge Charger. With
> Sanchez at the wheel, the Charger slammed into two
> vehicles during the pursuit before hitting Reisse, police
> said.
The argument is that the police should never be involved in a high-speed chase because it threatens the safety of the general public and often ends in tragedy like this.
It's always sad when someone brilliant loses life at such a young age. It's even worse that it was at the hands of a piece of shit criminal trying to save his own skin and is still alive.
I totally agree. It's the fact that a degenerate like that can end the life of someone awesome--the asymmetry--is what is really curse-worthy hard to understand.
Make sure you let your family know how much you care about them. Also make sure they will be taken care of in case you're suddenly gone. Firstly by picking up enough term life insurance to cover your dependents' needs until adulthood. Secondly by writing up a will and giving it to someone you trust. [1][2]
We joke about "getting hit by a bus" and a project's "bus factor"[3] but it really does happen. It could happen to you or to a critically important person on your project team. Make it a policy to have all critical info recorded in some systematic way. You don't have to get all iso9000 but you should, at the very least, have everyone do a brain dump into a wiki once a month and keep it in a central location (along with the password file, list of client info, etc.)
This is really sad and a great loss to the community over in Santa Monica. With this sort of thing happening so infrequently in tech, it makes events like these all the more of a loss, for our entire industry.
This happening so infrequently in tech makes it less of a loss. There are communities terrorized by criminal- and police-related violence, that lose so much more. Events like this should be a wake up call to be aware that tragedies happen all the time outside our bubble. And what can we do to prevent them?
How can we even judge? The police back off often when they sense that a chase is too dangerous, they make a judgement call. Sometimes they don't have perfect information however, and shit just happens. It is not like the movies.
I'm sure the officers involved are second guessing their behavior now, its not like people die every day like this. But really, its a tough job, we aren't really in a position to judge.
More bystanders are injured or killed during high-speed police chases than by stray bullets. In California, more than 10,000 people have been injured and over 300 people killed because of police chases in the last decade, according to newly released statistics from the California Highway Patrol.
Nationally, it's estimated nearly 300 people die each year as a result of high speed police chases.
> Nationally, it's estimated nearly 300 people die each year as a result of high speed police chases.
That's a huge number. I'd love to know how many of those 300 are innocent bystanders. The fact that people involved in the chase (i.e. those running away) lose their lives seems like it's part of the risk.
Are you seriously blaming the police for the death of that? Surely it is the guy's fault for stealing a car with a child in it and recklessly driving it.
"Blame" might be too far but there's definitely an argument to suggest they caused the baby's death, in that if they hadn't chased then maybe he wouldn't have driven so recklessly. Hence this whole discussion.
"Experts say there are few national figures on police pursuits. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures, based on reports from police departments, show that 305 people died in pursuits in 1991.
Of these deaths, 250 were reported to be occupants of fleeing vehicles, 46 were third-party victims in uninvolved vehicles, four were occupants of police vehicles and five were pedestrians."
Unless pursuit deaths rose a magnitude plus, I think you are misrepresenting some facts.
Normally I'd agree, but if you read the entirety of the article (or even half of it) you'll pick up the bit about the fatal shooting at the original scene of the crime (not sure if an officer was killed or one of the alleged criminals).
It's debatable what to do in the aftermath, pursue (the instant gut reaction) or sit tight and hope that other officers in the vicinity can intervene. Usually it's the former, and the consequences seem to involve carnage in one way or another (obviously tragic in this case as an innocent bystander was killed).
Sometimes these criminals have nothing to lose, over even relatively insignificant infractions that will definitely result in life sentences. Not that I'm condoning criminal behavior in any way.
308 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadWhat do you even say when stuff like this happens? He was a developer and in a way we never know when each of us will meet our ends.
He was 43 years old. Incredibly active, healthy and fit guy. He died of a very rare staph infection. By the time he was diagnosed, it was too late.
I think the lesson is that life is really short, and you never know when it will end. So you better make the most out of the time allotted to you, and the fact that you don't know how long you have left should only fuel your efforts.
R.I.P. Andrew.
Why does the police have to chase anyway? Why can't they just identify the car and silently follow it until it stops. Damn it.
Even if it is scary, I think it's possible that some officers won't back down from a chase. And this involved a chase of someone believed to be a public menace.
(Sorry, not justifying the actual chase. Just pointing out that it's not strange that it occurred, given the status quo there)
I watched a 25 year old woman die on the pavement at 16th and Dolores in San Francisco, hit by a car running a red light, being chased by cops. Apparently the car had been reported stolen.
Not a worthy mission, in my opinion.
Note: of course it's the chasee's fault. But cops know exactly what happens in these situations, and cannot be excused.
You can search for "[name of city] police general order pursuit", or some variant thereof, to get the policy for your local district.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/01/23/060123fa_fact_fr...
I haven't read it since it came out in 2006, but suffice it to say that the Los Angeles area has vastly more police chases per capita than the rest of the United States, and therefore if something like this was going to happen it's statistically unsurprising that it happened near LA.
From that article: "In 2004, California led the nation with 7,321 pursuits, and the majority of them-5,596-took place in L.A. County". Google cites approximately 10 million population for LA County and 38 million for California, so if my math is right that's roughly 56 car chases per 100,000 population in LA County versus 6 per 100,000 in the rest of the state. (Population figures are 2011 for LA County, 2012 for California, versus 2004 for the chase stats, but it should be pretty close.)
That doesn't answer why the police chase, because obviously it's done far less elsewhere, though it does happen. In Austin, Texas, my wife was overtaken on the highway by a car being chased by the police, and in order to avoid getting rear-ended by the chasee who was going very fast she side-swiped the vehicle next to her and substantial damage was done. Some day if that criminal strikes it rich she's theoretically got victim's compensation due to her. We're not holding our breath. They ended up catching the guy on foot after he exited the highway.
I'd suggest trying to correlate average vehicular speed with frequency of car chases. My guess is that certain cities are built for high-speed car transit and thus lend themselves towards this kind of thing.
From the article:
> The L.A. freeways are its public stage, its Colosseum. Pursuits are L.A.'s ultimate reality show,
I'm not some scholar on Los Angeles, but it really seems to be part of the culture there to watch car chases, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is positive feedback encouraging criminals to get their 15 minutes of fame.
After all, if you've just held up a 7-11 or something and you didn't get away cleanly, why not have a little fun before you get thrown in jail, possibly for the rest of your life ?
The number of fictional car chases in LA is also ridiculous. One was filmed on the block where I grew up, and I'm sure we weren't unusual in that.
Because you never cared about non-great ones. Observer bias.
And the US has the longest sentences, but apparently that isn't enough.
People aren't equal, you can't make it so by saying it.
The man who died was more significant than the man who killed him.
However, the fact humans are humans doesn't make them equal. Unlike a number humans have dimensionality. They can be taller, shorter, stronger, weaker, smarter, dumber, richer, poorer etc. Along with any number of other attributes like job, geographical location, father, mother etc.
Equality is a very precise thing and humans are anything but equal.
http://code.google.com/p/vbjin-ovr/source/browse/oculus/Comm...
Pretty much every organization I've worked for was missing a "key developer got hit by bus" plan for at least one major project.
My experience is you instead treat it like a computer backup problem and you add the contingency that top managers will know how to step in if information goes missing.
Also manage this with standards.
1) A new key developer would be hired to maintain the project, and things would be a little rough for a couple months but the company would survive.
2) Every decent person would care more about the key developers life than the "major project".
This so called "bus factor" has always bugged me. Documentation is good, but talk of untimely death by bus is silly.
The reference to untimely death by bus strike is an example of macabre geek humour; not a serious suggestion that the greatest threat to developers is posed by motorized mass transportation.
Most often developers leave projects -- and especially open source projects -- for far more banal reasons: They move to a different position and don't have the time or inclination to continue maintaining their old code.
Can someone else get access to all the company-owned code the developer was working on? Is someone insisting that the developer doesn't keep three months of work on a laptop? Who else can get access to the passwords and keys for company-owned servers and services maintained by the developer?
The idea isn't so much about being hit by a bus as "what would we do if a key contributor were to vanish off the face of the Earth with no notice or warning?" If the specific idea of the Death Bus seems too grim, feel free to replace it with another deus ex machina that would have the same effect (alien abduction, Christian rapture, surprise release of a new season of Firefly, etc.).
Secondly, my father has been an officer of the law for more than 25 years -- can we please not turn a thread which is being used to inform the community at large of a tragedy as a way to defame those who wish to do good in their community.
I ask out of respect of Reisse, and my good natured father that we keep at the very least this thread on topic.
Especially since internet discussions about police often turn into emotionally charged and hateful arguments, I think keeping the discussion focused on Reisse is a very good and respectful request.
I'm not saying that the U.S. is perfect, or that the EU isn't, but does anyone else remember when HN was for NEWS and not just an outgrowth of /r/politics?
I mean, obviously my comment won't change any of that, it's easy enough to see that the interest is there just by comparing comment count. But I do think it's unfortunate how much we have let politics poison the well here.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=aaron+swar...
If you people want politics here, I guess you'll get it. But you won't get politics and a quality site about hacking and startups.
Can you point to a single story since the inception of Hacker News that quite obviously involved the intersection of hacker/startup culture with the rest of society where politics were not discussed? What is any discussion about wealth or economics if not politics? Is it a vanishingly small percentage of PG's essays that express a strong political opinion?
As far as I'm concerned, discussing politics as they relate to hacker culture is on topic. Discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, not so on-topic, but nevertheless people here had interesting things to say from a hacker perspective. I'll be the first to agree that political extremism is aggravating, but the solution to political extremism is not the avoidance of politics altogether.
On the contrary, avoidance of all politics is a wonderful individual solution to political extremism. Which is why so many "normal" people refuse to get involved at all, which is why all of us "normal" people end up so surprised every 2 years over a bunch of reactionary representatives being elected.
At least on HN you were able to have reasoned political discourse, which is far less aggravating. Even where I disagree with others I love being exposed to angles I hadn't considered, cultural nuances that might explain why something would work in the EU that wouldn't work in the U.S. (and vice versa), and all of that.
But from what I can tell even on HN we're shifting farther and farther away from that into the creationist mold of "I have decided what the answer must be, now I need only twist the facts to suit". Even where the answer that's decided on is actually right, that's no way to conduct a 'debate'.
Who ever said anything about that?
I'm quite interested, and in my own way, involved in politics. I also follow bicycle racing with a passion, for that matter. But I don't think either one belongs on this particular web site.
I don't think you mean simply election politics, so my assumption is that you mean any kind of debate over government policy. In this example it would be a debate over the US government policy of pursuing suspects in high speed car chases.
I can understand how these kinds of things are off topic in the general case (Istanbul protests, Boston marathon, etc.), but are you saying they're still off topic when there's a fairly clear connection to a hacking / startup story? Are the discussions about rent control in SF off topic, for instance?
My belief is that there's a grey zone where considered discussion of the pros and cons is okay, even good. For instance, I wasn't even aware that there were debates about high speed chases at all, so for me this was something new and interesting. Most of the community wrecking I've seen has happened due to in-fighting and drama, but yes political mud fights are a common enough precursor to that, because they encourage people to hold grudges and take sides, at least in my experience.
Considered discussion is welcome on HN. Unfortunately there are some topics where considered discussion is unlikely. Abortion; circumcision; Israel / Palestine; gun control; etc etc. It'd be fantastic if there was a site like HN where these topics could be discussed, especially if that site fostered calm rational discussion.
But these discussions too often deteriorate into noise, and worse into wider ranging down-voting and derailments in other threads.
To put it bluntly Reisse was hit by an automobile by a criminal. Should the police have pursued the suspect through a crowded city the way that they did? No, however no one here was at the scene; maybe they HONESTLY believed they could end the ordeal without a lengthy chase and without the suspect getting away. That's a judgement call that every law enforcement officer deals with from time to time; with human nature telling us that we can't be correct all the time.
This is an incredible cop-out. No pun intended.
Just because someone wishes to do good in their community does not mean they are immune to being criticized for their actions.
Furthermore, a lot of cops don't give a shit about doing good in their community. They are bullies who have joined the police force to legitimize their violent tendencies.
We need more "good cops" like your father, but let's face it: we will not get them if we do not draw people's attention to the bad stuff a lot of cops do.
Except there's no point in this story if it's not turned into some general political discussion about random aspect of society.
The template of these types of headlines is "Random incident happened to semi-famous tech dude". Therefore it's going to turn into some kind of "Let's discuss policy surrounding random incident".
Generally, these are just bad stories.
The lot is a bunch of bullies who didn't want to grow up.
Just a really sad turn of events.
That doesn't necessarily mean the officer was shot.
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/05/santa_ana_pede...
He died of his injuries. His name was Gerardo Diego Ayala.
Very sad. Rest in peace.
Make sure you let your family know how much you care about them. Also make sure they will be taken care of in case you're suddenly gone. Firstly by picking up enough term life insurance to cover your dependents' needs until adulthood. Secondly by writing up a will and giving it to someone you trust. [1][2]
We joke about "getting hit by a bus" and a project's "bus factor"[3] but it really does happen. It could happen to you or to a critically important person on your project team. Make it a policy to have all critical info recorded in some systematic way. You don't have to get all iso9000 but you should, at the very least, have everyone do a brain dump into a wiki once a month and keep it in a central location (along with the password file, list of client info, etc.)
-
[1] DIY will: http://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Own-Last-Will-and-Testamen...
[2] Reasonably priced template: http://www.legalzoom.com/legal-wills/wills-overview.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2_d6Hwvh5I&t=36s
Reposting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2_d6Hwvh5I&t=36s
Condolences to the family and Oculus team.
two vehicles full of people involved in some type of criminal activity
Was this yet another incident where the police self-escalated the situation?
I sure hope there was a precise reason this happened and not that "they smelled pot".
I'm sure the officers involved are second guessing their behavior now, its not like people die every day like this. But really, its a tough job, we aren't really in a position to judge.
So much so they had to pass laws to make it illegal for police to do chases in many cities/situations to stop them.
http://www.pursuitsafety.org/
http://kristieslaw.org/
http://abcnews.go.com/US/police-chases-california-injured-10...
More bystanders are injured or killed during high-speed police chases than by stray bullets. In California, more than 10,000 people have been injured and over 300 people killed because of police chases in the last decade, according to newly released statistics from the California Highway Patrol.
Nationally, it's estimated nearly 300 people die each year as a result of high speed police chases.
That's a huge number. I'd love to know how many of those 300 are innocent bystanders. The fact that people involved in the chase (i.e. those running away) lose their lives seems like it's part of the risk.
Citation required. The language seems intentionally very vague and inclusive, which seems to be supported by-
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/26/us/alarmed-by-deaths-in-ca...
"Experts say there are few national figures on police pursuits. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures, based on reports from police departments, show that 305 people died in pursuits in 1991.
Of these deaths, 250 were reported to be occupants of fleeing vehicles, 46 were third-party victims in uninvolved vehicles, four were occupants of police vehicles and five were pedestrians."
Unless pursuit deaths rose a magnitude plus, I think you are misrepresenting some facts.
It's debatable what to do in the aftermath, pursue (the instant gut reaction) or sit tight and hope that other officers in the vicinity can intervene. Usually it's the former, and the consequences seem to involve carnage in one way or another (obviously tragic in this case as an innocent bystander was killed).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law
Sometimes these criminals have nothing to lose, over even relatively insignificant infractions that will definitely result in life sentences. Not that I'm condoning criminal behavior in any way.